Key Letter By Descartes Found After 170 Years 165
Schiphol writes of a long-lost letter by René Descartes to Marin Mersenne that has come to light at Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, where it had lain buried in the archives for more than a century. The discovery could revolutionize our view of one of the 17th-century French philosopher's major works. "[T]housands of treasured documents... vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes... Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania... The letter, dated May 27, 1641, concerns the publication of Meditations on First Philosophy, a celebrated work whose use of reason and scientific methods helped to ignite a revolution in thought."
heresy (Score:3, Interesting)
(in french)
Re:Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:3, Interesting)
"I think therefore I am" sounds a bit bold an affirmation. It's more like "I think I think, therefore I think I think I think" IMHO.
It's not really all that bold. According to my philosophy professors (I was a philosophy major), the statement Descartes made actually translates a bit better to "I think, I am". When taken in context (attempting to doubt every possible thing), this statement means that I can be certain that I am thinking (whatever that may mean, it may mean I am creating the sounds that I hear in my head or it may mean that those sounds are being put into me). If I am thinking, then there is something that definitely exists (otherwise there would be no one to have thought) - and further more that something is me. Everything else in the world may be a lie or deception, but with certainty: I exist by the virtue of having thought (though I may not be what I think I am and the world may not be what I think it is).
Re:Could revolutionize? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I believe in God, I just don't belive in using God as a rationalization for science, as Descartes did in every chapter after 1.
meh, philosophy is dead (Score:3, Interesting)
Historically is was a place for science and mathmatics. Since those disciplines now have there own fields, what the hell good is philosphy?
Before someone responds with the boring and done arguments, my initial goal in college was to become a philosophy professor. It was then I realized it ahs nothing new to offer the world. Even the most basic philosophy question have been answered.
Which came first, chicken or the egg? Evolution has taught is it was the egg.
If yopu walk towards something, but only half the remaining difference, will you ever get there: Quantum mechanics has shown us that, yes, we would get there because there is a smallest distance that can be moved.
These may be interesting papers because they come from a time when philosophy was critical to develop logical, rational, and skeptical questions.
Re:I'm guessing the letter was: "é " (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:meh, philosophy is dead (Score:2, Interesting)
What good are science and mathematics? Well, some of it has practical application. But the main reason people study those things is that they find them interesting. People don't become scientists or mathematicians for "the good" of anything, they just do it because it's interesting. It just happens to have useful side effects down the line. So it is with philosophy which, as you mention, produced those fields. So by the transitive property, philosophy is useful insofar is it allowed the production of fields like science and math. Not to mention that the fundamentals of both science and math are still philosophical issues. Science is nothing without interpretation, and interpretation of scientific results is just metaphysics.
>Before someone responds with the boring and done arguments, my initial goal in college was to become a philosophy professor. It was then I realized it ahs nothing new to offer the world. Even the most basic philosophy question have been answered.
That might have been your goal, but from your post I'm not sure it was ever a serious option for you. It would be like me saying the reason I'm not a professional soccer player is that "I realized it has nothing to offer the world" rather than the actual reason, which is that I wasn't good at it. I suspect similar is the case here.
>Which came first, chicken or the egg? Evolution has taught is it was the egg.
Actually, if evolution has taught us anything this question, it's that was the chicken. But since this is your idea of a 'philosophical question' your failure to ascend to a post in academic philosophy is, as I mentioned, unsurprising. This may shock you, but it's quite hard to become a philosopher. Getting into Harvard law school is a joke compared to getting into a top philosophy grad school in terms of intellectual talent required.
>If yopu walk towards something, but only half the remaining difference, will you ever get there: Quantum mechanics has shown us that, yes, we would get there because there is a smallest distance that can be moved.
Your idea of serious philosophical problems are "which came first, the chicken or the egg" and the sophistical paradoxes of Zeno, which were refuted as soon as he produced them?
>These may be interesting papers because they come from a time when philosophy was critical to develop logical, rational, and skeptical questions.
Like I said, the fact that your idea of philosophy is Zeno's paradox and the chicken and egg shows that your understanding of philosophy is quite limited. Contemporary philosophy is, in some respects, quite difficult to differentiate from science. Philosophy of Mind is fully engaged with neuroscience, biology, cognitive science, etc. Even a cursory glance at some of the issues contemporary philosophers work on would show you that this is the case.
Re:Meditations on First Philosophy (Score:5, Interesting)
Couldn't disagree more, except that Descartes was clearly an important transitional figure whose philosophical work, like Hume's, is as relevant to what serious modern philosophy ought to be doing as Newton's alchemical work is to what serious modern chemistry ought to be doing.
"Having God as a first premise" is trivially incoherent. It leaves unanswered and the questions, "What is God?" and "How do I know anything about God in the first place?" which can obviously only be answered by reference to something else, which in fact is sense-experience, rather that "thought" as Descarte imagined. Since sense-experience is trivially prior to the very notion of God, it is clear that having God as a first premise is incoherent at best and dishonest at worst.
Descartes big mistake in this regard was to believe that since he could fantasize about a disembodied intelligence that it had some ontological weight. Everyone but philosophers now knows that this method is useless, because we know that it is easy for us to imagine things that are contradictory and impossible. Humans suck at deducitve closure, so it is easy for us to fail to notice the incoherence of our own imaginings. We have only two methods of ensuring such coherence: empirical investigation and mathematical deduction, neither of which philosophers have adopted because they don't care about truth. They continue to treat their imaginings and the limits of their imaginings as being ontological determinative.
Descartes' mathematical work, which was fundamental to the eventual melding of algebra and geometry that gave us modern mathematics, has had lasting value. His philosophical work was important only for its transitional role. He was a step on the way that's best forgotten today by all but historians.
Hume is even less coherent than Descarte, with less excuse. His attempts to undertake an empirical analsyis of sense-experience are so far off the mark as to be laughable. Even knowing what was known in his own time about the perception of objects it was obvious he didn't have a clue what he was talking about with his fantasies of pure sensations, which are incredibly hard to produce even in the laboratory. Hume somehow failed to notice that he had never had a pure sensation in his life. That tells you something about the quality of his philosophy. That he ultimatly ends up arguing that his own books should be burned--since they clearly fail to fulfill the criteria for non-burning he sets out--is another clue to just how incoherent he was.
Hume is to be honoured for waking Kant from his "dogmatical slumber", but not much else.
Lost or "lost"? (Score:1, Interesting)
A big-name chief librarian friend of mine told me once that most "lost" documents are actually documents whose provenance is questionable and the institution is simply waiting for some legal clock to tick (statute of limitations, death of last legal descendant, lapse of insurance claim, etc) before they can be "found".
Re:meh, philosophy is dead (Score:2, Interesting)
Though mathematics is useful as a technology in the sciences, its ontological basis is questionable (and therefore, its link to the sciences might be specious at best.) Note, I'm not questioning the entire enterprise of science as a whole, but I'm simply bringing up the fact that there are real problems with mathematics and science that still require philosophical inquiry.
Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(mathematics) [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_realism#Mathematical_realism [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(mathematics) [wikipedia.org]